A blend of advocacy and (so to speak) sober reportage on an issue that’s only superficially whimsical.
An enlightening survey of 21st-century cannabis consumers, at an estimated 200 million strong.
British Columbia–based journalist Preston explains that although he was a “moderate toker” by local standards, his Rolling Stone editor perceived him as a “stoner dude,” and assigned him a story on the Canadian marijuana scene, which led to this study: “Pot lovers, psychologically landlocked by the War on Drugs, need to be reminded there’s a big ol’ world out there where the DEA doesn’t hold sway.” Preston modulates his pothead’s holiday with an alluring multinational slant—he narrates a journey through 12 countries (including Switzerland, Spain, Australia, Laos, Thailand, and the US), bookended by a local growers’ competition in Canada, and the infamous High Times “Cannabis Cup” in Amsterdam. Although Preston consumes much marijuana, hashish, kif, and sundry teas and baked goods during his travels, his observations stay thankfully sharp and lucid. Generally speaking, Preston discerns a subtle international watershed: while law enforcement in poorer countries like Nepal and Morocco ignore native cannabis consumers and tolerate (or exploit) the cash influx of so-called “drug tourists,” European nations (save France, Germany, and Sweden) are attempting to permit discreet particular cannabis possession without welcoming those same drug tourists. His jaunts through specific countries are always engaging, revealing the semi-organized underground communities necessitated by the herb’s illegal status. Back home in Vancouver, for example, a network of growers and seed/equipment suppliers pursue strains like “Bubbleberry” and “Pearly Girl” with gourmet zeal. In England, Preston follows the nascent “hempster” movement’s engagement with governmental agencies, a traditional gambit of European social activists. Elsewhere, localized irony abounds: in Muslim communities, liquor consumption is scorned over communal hash-smoking, while Holland’s tolerance of soft drugs incongruously results from that nation’s stolid conservatism. Beyond the endearing stoned camaraderie of Preston’s travelogue, he condemns pot prohibition with sound reasoning (e.g., that it encourages a criminalized black market) in case any social conservatives are reading, while his fellow travelers will enjoy knowing, for instance, how not to get hustled in Tangier. But the author also confirms there’s no alternative to getting hustled in America, courtesy of the taxpayer-financed, cannabis-focused atrocity of the drug war.
A blend of advocacy and (so to speak) sober reportage on an issue that’s only superficially whimsical.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8021-3897-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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